


we were never here

by ourdarkspirits



Category: Indiana Jones Series
Genre: F/M, Introspection, Pre-Canon, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-18
Updated: 2018-12-18
Packaged: 2019-09-21 20:56:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,049
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17050427
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ourdarkspirits/pseuds/ourdarkspirits
Summary: Long before he walked into her bar in Nepal, Indiana Jones walked into Marion Ravenwood's life. And then he walked right back out.





	we were never here

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Shanynde](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shanynde/gifts).



When Marion’s father told her he was bringing someone from the school onto his dig, she pictured someone stuffy, old, the kind of man who looked like he was away from his office against his better judgment. Henry Jones was not any of that. He was young, kind of skinny and rumpled. He had a flop of hair that fell into his eyes. It made him look like an overgrown schoolboy.  

She had better things to do. She knew she did. Her eyes didn’t need to be wandering over to Henry (call me Indiana) Jones all the time. They did.

She didn’t even think he’d noticed her until he sat down with her in the canteen. She was already sitting there, she’ll tell anybody who asked. He sat down with her, not the other way around. 

She pushed her food around her plate, trying not to stare at his face,  a little more weathered now than when he first showed up. She did  _ not _ wish he would look up at her.

“You’re staring,” he said to his food, before looking up at her.

“I’m not.”

He lifted his eyebrow at her but she didn’t say anything; she was too busy wondering how he’d gotten that scar on his chin.

Instead, she asked, “Why Indiana?”

“What?”

“Your name. Henry Jones, call me Indiana,” she mimicked. She thought it was a pretty good impression. 

He grimaced and she wondered if he was offended. Maybe he would get up, eat somewhere else. He didn’t.

“It’s where I’m from,” he muttered, once again talking to his tray.

  
Marion snorted. She couldn’t help it. “Maybe I should start going by Chicago then.”

He gave her a lopsided little grin, and it suddenly occurred to her that there was probably more to the name Indiana than he was willing to talk about.  She let it drop. Everything else she wanted to ask seemed too personal so she returned her focus to her food, trying to eat faster so she could leave him in peace. Maybe he would move. 

Indiana stayed just long enough to finish his lunch but he didn’t say anything more. He stood up with a mumbled goodbye which she only returned once he was almost out the door. 

* * *

 

Marion was cataloguing the latest finds from the dig next time she spoke to Indiana. She happened to let out a frustrated groan over what seemed like the thousandth pottery shard of the day as he was walking by. 

He poked his head in the door. “Something wrong?”

She looked up and noted how unfair his half smile was. She gestured at the notebook in front of her and said, “I thought it would be more exciting.”

“Is this your first dig?” He asked, looking far too amused. 

“Yes. I thought it would be more ‘x marks the spot’ and buried treasure, not,” she gestured at the book in front of her, “this.”

“X never, ever marks the spot,” he remarked wryly, turning the book around to peruse her catalogue. “This is your first time?”

“I already told you that,” Marion replied, feeling inexplicably petulant.

“It’s a good system,” he remarked. “Come on.”

“What?” She couldn’t figure out where the sudden shift had come from, but he was standing up, watching her expectantly. 

“You could use a break.”

Marion’s stomach was doing somersaults. Stopping by the office and telling her “X never, ever marks the spot,” she could handle. This felt like more. She jumped up, leaving everything scattered across the desk and followed him through the tent flap. 

She didn’t know what to expect when he dragged her out of the tent, but she supposed that a tour of the dig site shouldn’t have come as a surprise. Indiana Jones was, after all, an archaeologist, just like her father. 

He was talking about everything he and her father had learned about the people who lived here so long ago, and while he talked he came alive. It made the site around her come alive. She was mesmerized and she was pretty sure she was in love with him. 

“Maybe it’s not as exciting as buried treasure,” he remarked after a while, “but there’s a story here. And we can tell it.”

“This is all going to go in a museum?” Marion asked.

“To be preserved and displayed for anyone to see,” he nodded.

She was speechless, which wasn’t something one could often say about Marion. But her stomach was trying to jump into her throat or do some type of acrobatics that it wasn’t designed to do and she couldn’t stop looking at him. He wasn’t paying attention to her though. He was in somewhere in the past.

* * *

 

After that day, Marion found herself spending more time with Indiana. The first time she found him not working on her way out to the nearby market, she convinced him to come with her. She showed him her favorite stalls. They ate dates and she just managed to get everything off her list. It felt like a date.

There were no theaters by the Nile. No parks. Nowhere to go on a traditional date, but somehow none of that would have felt right with Indy. Indiana. Whatever that was about. She hadn’t pushed it since the first time they ate together. Walking through the markets, following him to some new find on the dig, that felt right. 

It became easy to think of them as a pair. She began to wonder what it might be like after the dig, to wonder what they would be when they left Egypt. She never expected that he would disappear so completely from her life. All those months together had felt like a courtship. Marian had begun to plan out a life, a life that had Indiana Jones in it.

She was left with a berth on a steamer, traveling through the Mediterranean back home. In Chicago, she continued to hold out hope that she would hear from Indiana again. That he would come up the walk, tell her he had made a mistake. But he didn’t. He wouldn’t. Not for many years, when she was operating a bar in Nepal. And when he walked in that door, he didn’t offer apologies. He came with trouble on his heels.


End file.
